CARL Cleves and Parissa Bouas, the multi-award-winning singer/songwriters who have delighted audiences from Berlin to Brazil and from Madagascar to Melbourne, are to treat an audience in Uralla with an afternoon of inspired music making.
Better known in Australia as The Hottentots, Carl and Parissa are popular performers at all major Australian folk festivals. Their concert in Uralla on Sunday 25 August is part of a tour of regional NSW that will include performances at the Dorrigo Folk and Bluegrass Festival and the Mullumbimby Music Festival.
Their deeply-felt lyrics are supported by outstanding vocal and instrumental skills, and their experience in a variety of musical cultures adds an international flavour to folk music that is both soul-searching and exhilarating.
Their concert will be at McCrossin’s Mill, Salisbury Street, Uralla, starting at 3 pm. It will feature songs from their two new solo CDs, The Full Force of the Wind (Parissa Bouas) and The House is Empty (Carl Cleves). The concert will also include songs from their latest joint CD, Out of Australia. In a review of that CD, one critic referred to the performers’ “deep vein of humanity that leaves audiences moved, uplifted, and crying out for more”.
Carl Cleves, originally from Belgium, has travelled the world and explored its music. His adventures have included working as an antelope trapper in Uganda, a relief worker in cyclone-struck India, a band leader and recording star in Brazil, a radio broadcaster and ethnomusicologist in Africa, an encyclopaedia salesman in Bangkok, and a fisherman in the South Pacific.
His book Tarab: Travels with My Guitar, published in 2008, gives an insight into how those experiences have contributed to his development as an artist.
Parissa Bouas combines a beautiful singing voice with an emotional sensitivity that audiences find deeply moving.
In Brazil she was named “Patativa” after a bird renowned for its singing. In 2000 she co-wrote the anthem-like song “Put Your Hand in Mine” for the Woodford Millennium Fire Event Choir of 700 voices, and conducted the performance before a crowd of 20,000 people.
Tickets for Carl and Parissa’s Uralla concert will be available at the door of McCrossin’s Mill from 2.30 pm on Sunday 25 August. Cost is $20 ($17 concession).
